Holocaust: Hitler’s Answer to the Jewish Question

Nathan GanapathiNovember 8, 2018

Holocaust: Hitler’s Answer to the Jewish Question

Hitler’s View

In Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, he explained why he viewed Jews negatively and why the Holocaust was necessary. In his political manifesto, Hitler (wrongly) saw the Jews as the main reason for the failures of the socialists, Bolsheviks, and Germany during the First World War. Hitler’s political theory—which was mixed with his racial theory that Jews, Slavs, and Gypsies are inferior to white Europeans and the Germans (whom he described as the Aryan race)—belongs on top.

Before he became the chancellor of Nazi Germany, Hitler’s ideology on race and racial purity was a big part of his philosophy. In fact, during the German Worker’s Party’s (the precursor of the Nazi Party) first meeting, the party outlined its political agenda that demanded purity of the German race. It is the Aryan race’s destiny to rule over inferior races, and that no Jew can be a member of the nation.

Hitler’s obsession with cleansing the superior Aryan race from impurities became the German government’s own ideology when he came into power.

Addressing the Jewish Question

A day after Adolf Hitler declared war on the US, he delivered a speech in Berlin to Nazi leadership. Josef Goebbels, a high ranking Nazi politician and the Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany, was in the audience during the speech. Goebbels documented in his diary what Hitler said:

With regard to the Jewish Question, the Fuehrer is determined to make a clean sweep. He prophesized, that if they (the Jews) brought about another world war, they would experience their annihilation. This was no empty talk. The world war is here. The annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence. This question is to be viewed without sentimentality. We’re not to have sympathy with the Jews, but the only sympathy with our German people. If the German people have again now sacrificed around 160,000 dead in the eastern campaign, the instigators of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their own lives.

Another high-ranking Nazi official, Hans Frank (appointed Nazi ruler of the General Government), said that Hitler instructed him and his comrades to “liquidate the Jews . . . themselves.” In the same order, Hitler stated, “As an old National Socialist, I must state that if the Jewish clan were to survive the war in Europe, while we sacrificed our best blood in the defense of Europe, then this war would only represent a partial success.”

The Aftermath and the Final Solution

Hitler’s racially charge speeches against the Jews escalated the anti-Semitic actions of Nazi Germany. It was after Hitler’s speech on the Jewish question that the Final Solution was decided. Nazi police, including the dreaded Waffen-SS, started rounding up Jews and other minorities and deposited them in overcrowded ghettos while the constructions of the concentration camps were underway.

The Holocaust is one of the most devastating and inhumane crimes done during the World War II. Many scholars and researchers are still studying the root of Hitler’s intense hatred for the Jewish people. Whatever psychological reasons they may find, it is still undeniable that Hitler is a central figure why the holocaust happened.